


Last Period, Best Choice

by gala_apples



Series: First Impressions [1]
Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Gen, High School, Social Phobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-05
Updated: 2012-06-05
Packaged: 2017-11-06 22:02:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/423753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gala_apples/pseuds/gala_apples
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ray Toro never wanted to switch schools. But as it turns out, it's not the worst thing in the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Last Period, Best Choice

Ray doesn’t actually like being around people. He could happily spend the rest of his life in his own house, having the occasional conversation on the phone or on an instant messenger. Sadly, others don’t seem to think that’s a sane way to go about life, and so he has to do shit like go to school and go to restaurants and go shopping.

It’s a problem -not that he sees it as a problem, but his parents do, and what he thinks generally doesn’t count with them- with four prongs to it. It’s like a fork of anti-socialism. The first prong is crowds of people make him feel like rooms are too small. He’s not spatially claustrophobic, he could crawl inside the trunk of a car and not give a shit. He’s people claustrophobic, more than five people in a room and Ray’s mind starts doing weird physics problems trying to divide the volume of air in the room by the amount of bodies in it. The second prong is every time he goes out, it becomes immediately clear people don’t like him. Everyone’s always looking at him, watching to see if he’ll fuck up, so they can laugh at him for it. The third prong is he tends to sound like an idiot. When he’s forced into conversation with people whatever he wants to say always comes out wrong. And that inevitably leads to reviewing the conversations over and over and wishing he could time travel and intervene. Like Doctor Who, except only concerned with his own problems. The final reason he’d rather just be by himself is most of society are assholes. Even if he wanted to like people, to please his mother, he couldn’t because Ray Toro doesn’t get along with assholes, and almost everyone is an asshole.

Prong four includes his own family. He is where he is now because his brother is an asshole. Lou is a jock, someone who needs an athletic scholarship to get into college because he’s far too dense to have any sort of grade point average. Unfortunately for him, Faber’s football team sucked horribly. A losing streak as wide as Jared pre-Subway meant he was screwed as far as talent scouts were concerned. Lou had somehow managed to convince their parents to let him transfer to a school that had a team with potential. That Ray was fine with, it’s not like he cared what team Lou belonged it. It wasn’t like he was going to watch his games, regardless of location.

The issue is the fucker had talked mom and dad into believing that Faber was the problem for Ray too, that the students were jerks and bullies. Which was somewhat true, it wasn’t like Louis was completely full of shit. Where things failed was Lou had implied that Convington would be better for him, that Ray would make friends there. Ray’s not entirely sure why Lou would do that to him, but by the time he’d found out to protest, the student files were already transferred.

So here he is, three weeks into September, just late enough to make him the awkward new sophomore. There are subtle ways being the new kid sucks, and there are obvious ways. Not knowing if a teacher will let you go to the bathroom if you raise your hand is the former, the seating situation is by far the latter.

Frankly it’s hard to tell what’s worse, the classes with assigned seating or the classes without. His class schedule has him in five classes a day; a mandatory science, math, social studies and English credit, as well as film. Next semester will be less structured, his only mandatory class will be phys-ed. It’s not much of a consolation for this semester, in which all five courses are held in classes with individual desks. Even his science credit has desks, labs with tables and stools are reserved for biology and chemistry, not physics.

Coming in two weeks late means everyone has carefully rearranged desks so the shitty desks that are forty years old, splintery seat connected to the top with almost entirely peeled painted metal are sitting in parts of the grid that no one wants to sit in. Those few spots are all that are open to Ray, uncomfortable desk augmented brilliantly by the fact that he’s sitting in the loser zone, so the teenagers surrounding him tend to be the droolers and nose pickers.

But assigned seating has it’s problems too. In two of his five classes he’s being used to break up talkative friends who clearly resent him for it, like it’s his fault. And History is alphabetical, and every time he comes in more than a minute later than Bethany Underwood she switches their desks so he gets the one with the oddly shaped seafoam plastic seat that makes a farting noise every time you try to adjust.

One day Bethany’s not there and Ray’s primary reaction is to settle comfortably on his navy blue plastic chair, rest his feet on the metal bar that’s halfway between the floor and the wooden top of the desk and consider it a good day. The dye job redhead on her other side doesn’t seem so content. He stretches across the too narrow, very fire hazardy aisle way and her empty desk to ask “Where do you think she is?”

As the extent that Bethany concerns his life is whether or not he gets the shitty desk Ray shrugs. It’s enough to encourage the guy, who says “I heard she was pulled out because she was bulimic. Isn’t that sad? I don’t think people should have to feel bad about their bodies.”

Ray can’t help himself, he stares at the guy. This is high school. You can’t say stuff like that, truth or not. It doesn’t matter if it’s sad, or fucked up, or that the people that made her feel like that are assholes, because it’s _high school_. The guy doesn’t seem to feel embarrassed about showing his empathy though. He just shrugs at Ray’s silence and sits up, starting to draw on the black canvas cover of his binder in White Out. From what Ray can see, it’s a dead unicorn. It’s interesting, but not enough to inquire about. He’ll only sound like an idiot anyway, and the guy will probably mock him for it.

Bethany continues to not show up, and so starts a week of the guy talking at him every day. It’s always a random jumble of things, bands he should maybe download (bands Ray’s mostly heard of and liked), whether or not he did the homework and didn’t he think question three was stupid (answers being an unsaid yes and yes), Mikey used my fine tipped copics for a poster for his class, aren’t brothers douchenozzles (Ray doesn’t know what a copic is, but whole-heartedly yes), and so on.

Finally Ray shrugs and asks him his name. The guy looks at him eyebrows raised expressively before answering “It’s Gerard. I say ‘here’ to it at the start of every class.”

“Yeah, I don’t really pay attention to stuff like that.”

“Too cool for attendance?” Ray winces. This is how it starts, people accusing him of things he never said. It can only get worse from here, but it’s not like it will _matter_ , whatever happens to him won’t matter as long as Lou has the football team. Just as Ray’s imagining the entire class turning to throw things at him Gerard laughs. “Yeah, I think one day we should change Erikson’s paper with one of our own. See who answers to El Diablo, who to Videodrome.”

Ray can’t help himself. “You’ve seen that movie?” He didn’t think anyone had ever seen that movie besides him.

“I’ve seen everything David Cronenberg does. My favourite is Rabid though.”

“Don’t think I’ve seen it. What’s it about?”

“This woman gets a tissue transplant which turns into a stinger in her armpit which she uses to drink people’s blood. Everyone she drinks turns into a zombie. It’s fucking awesome. You want to watch it after class?”

Ray thinks about it for a minute. Worst case scenario is he says something stupid and Gerard kicks him out of his house, and then gets his friends to kick his ass tomorrow. But the likelihood seems lower with Gerard than with most people; people with good tastes in movies tend to be less likely to be assholes. And he’s never seen a movie about zombie armpits, and he’ll never be able to get it out of his head if he doesn’t. “Cool.”

“Good. I need to pick up my brother from his junior high, but if you don’t have a car you can just come in my shitheap? I’m not very good at directions.”

He doesn’t particularly want to _tell_ Lou he doesn’t need a ride, that sort of information will only make him cocky and sure he was right about changing schools. But he can figure that out some time in the next hour. “Yeah, I’ll hop a ride.”

Four minutes later when Mr Erikson calls out ‘Gerard Way’ Ray hisses ‘Max Renn’ and Gerard giggles before he answers “Here!”


End file.
